The Michigan Daily - michigandaily.com Wednesday, A pril 6, 2011 - 3A NEWS BRIEFS WASHINGTON Congress votes to repeal part of healthcare law Congress sent the White House its first rollback of last year's health care law yesterday, a bipartisan repeal of a burdensome tax reporting requirement that's widely unpopular with business- es. Even President Barack Obama is eager to see it gone. The Senate voted 87 to 12 to repeal the filing requirement, which would have forced mil- lions of businesses to file tax forms for every vendor selling them more than $600 in goods each year, starting in 2012. The filing requirement is unrelated to health care. However, it would have been used to pay for part of the new health law. Republicans hope it is the first of many such bills, resulting in the entire health care law being scrapped. Democrats say the bill is part of an inevitable tinkering that will be needed to improve the health measure. QUITO, Ecuador Equador expels U.S. ambassador Ecuador said yesterday it is expelling the U.S. ambassador over a diplomatic cable divulged by WikiLeaks that accuses a newly retired police chief of a long history of corruption and speculates that President Rafael Correa was aware of it. Foreign Minister Ricardo Patino announced Ambassador Heather Hodges' expulsion at a news conference. Patino said the ambassador, called to his office the previous afternoon, had not explained what led her to suggest in the 2009 cable that Correa knew of "supposed acts of corruption by members of the police leadership and more specifically the former commander of the institution, Jaime Hurtado Vaca." GENEVA Record ozone loss seen this winter The depletion of the ozone layer shielding Earth from dam- aging ultraviolet rays has reached an unprecedented low over the Arctic this spring because of harmful chemicals and a cold winter, the U.N. weather agency said yesterday. The Earth's fragile ozone layer in the Arctic region has suffered a loss of about 40 percent from the start of winter until late March, exceeding the previous season- al loss of about 30 percent, the World Meteorological Organiza- tion said. The Geneva-based agency blamed the loss on a buildup of ozone-eating chemicals once widely used as coolants and fire retardants in a variety of appli- ances and on very cold tempera- tures in the stratosphere, the second major layer of the Earth's atmosphere, just above the tropo- sphere. Big House to get two 4,000- square-foot LED screens Vice President of Engineering for Luca Technologies Roland DeBruyn, left, and Verlin Danna, the company's vice presi- dent of operations, stand at a coal-bed methane well near Gillette, Wyoming. Companies use microbes to turn coal to gas in Wyo. Scientists hope to double or triple gas production GILLETTE, Wyo. (AP) - New scientific research has a pair of energy companies betting that the future of the U.S. natu- ral gas industry lies in persuad- ing microorganisms to treat old coal deposits like all-you-can eat buffets. Coal, researchers have found, is full of microbes that consume the fossil fuel and break it down into methane gas. Two compa- nies want to take advantage of this naturally occurring phe- nomenon on a large scale to cre- ate vast amounts of natural gas in energy-rich places like Wyo- ming. "Once you figure out the rec- ipe that feeds the bugs and gets them reactivated, it's pretty simple," said Bob Cavnar, chief executive of Luca Technolo- gies. Luca and Ciris Energy have begun experimenting with using this type of microbe- friendly formula in gas wells drilled into coal deposits years ago. The companies have been spiking the wells with sub- stances including calcium, magnesium, phosphate and glycerol, which encourage the micro-organisms to reproduce, feed and release the coveted methane gas. The hope is to get old and nearly tapped-out coal-bed methane wells to double or per- haps triple gas production. The process works on a smaller scale, said Michael Urynowicz, a researcher at the University of Wyoming who has studied using microbes to turn coal into methane. "The question is, at the field scale, how economically viable it will be?" he said. Some worry it will con- taminate the groundwater that supplies more than 6,000 area homes. What Luca calls "nutrients," Jill Morrison of the Powder River Basin Resource Council calls "chemicals." "They make it sound like it's yogurt and granola or some- thing. It's not," Morrison said. "I'm not saying that maybe this technology doesn't have some promise at some point. But I don't think we're there, and we don't know enough about it." The experiment comes in the midst of a natural gas boom that has seen companies in several states just begin to tap vast gas deposits only now being recog- nized for their enormous poten- tial. To many, those reserves look all the more attractive while the Japanese nuclear crisis raises worries about nuclear energy and the Gulf oil spill casts doubt on tapping the nation's best remaining oil deposits. Butdrillingforgas can require multimillion-dollar investments to bore thousands of feet into the ground. Such wells produce a lot of gas quickly, Cavnar said, but production falls off before long, requiring companies to drill more and more sites to remain profitable. If successful, the microbe technology could help prolong the future of Wyoming's gas industry, which supports tens of thousands of jobs and provided $1.1 billion in tax revenue to the state in 2009. Luca officials cast aside environmental concerns, say- ing its process for tapping into natural gas is more eco-friend- ly and efficient than drilling because the wells, roads and pipelines already are in place. Acquiring methane from exist- ing coal beds requires very little new infrastructure, Luca says, and puts to use byproduct groundwater by pumping the water back down into the coal- bed methane wells. About 30,000 coal-bed meth- ane wells have been drilled in the Powder River Basin in northeastern Wyoming over the past 15 years. About half are nearly or completely tapped out. "We think the source here is huge for us to be able to go in and reactivate those wells and start producing gas again," Cavnar said. Thousands of different microbes - no one knows exactly how many species are down there - live in the thick coal seams several hundred feet beneath the rolling prairie in northeast Wyoming. Luca has been doing DNA research to identify the fewer than 100 species which play dif- ferent roles in breaking down the complex organic molecules in coal into a single simple mol- ecule, said Roland DeBruyn, the company's vice president of engineering. "The microbes, they're really working in communi- ties," DeBruyn said. "They're kind of taking different pieces of the chain apart. And in the end, you're left with the small- est pieces of the chain, which is basically methane." The other company looking to tap into the new source of energy, Ciris Energy, got a $4.8 million matching state grant in 2009 to build an above-ground pilot facility that would employ microbes to turn coal into meth- ane. Wyoming has a substantial interest in such investments: About 40 percent of the U.S. coal supply comes from Wyoming, providing more than $2 billion in economic benefit to the state each year. New scoreboards to be installed in Crisler, Yost arenas By KAITLIN WILLIAMS Daily StaffReporter Visitors to the Big House this fall will view football games on LED screens that are 40 per- cent larger and have new custom scoring systems, the University Athletic Department First seen on announced -the wire yesterday. Two 4,000-square-foot video screens will be installed in each end zone of Michigan Stadium. Though demolition of the cur- rent screens began last month, the new scoreboards will be installed by this August - in time for Michigan's first game of the 2011 season against Western Michigan on Sept. 3. The project is slated to cost about $20 million, according to a communication to the Univer- sity Board of Regents submit- ted by Athletic Director David Brandon in January. The regents unanimously approved the plan at their meeting in January. The Athletic Department has employed Texas-based TS Sports/Lighthouse to replace the scoreboards in the three facili- ties, Brandon wrote in a press release issued yesterday. "We are excited to partner with TS Sports on new, state-of- the-artscoreboards forour three largest venues," Brandon wrote. "Our goal is to set a new, higher standard for our fans' viewing experience and the game day atmosphere we create in our venues. These boards will be an important first step in achieving that goal." Video screens will also be installed at Yost Ice Arena for the first time, replacing the are- na's current scoreboards. The arena will receive nine, center- hung LED video displays, the release stated. A new center-hungscoreboard made of 14 LED video displays will also replace the current 13-year-old scoreboard in Crisler Arena. The new scoreboard will be part of a $52 million facelift of the facility, which calls for a 63,000- square-foot addition and an overhaul of the building that is intended to improve the fan experience, Brandon wrote in a Jan. 20 press release. "Our goal is to create a home court advantage for our teams while making the fan experience memorable from the moment they walk into the arena," Bran- don wrote. Crisler Arena's video equip- ment will also be converted to high-definition during the con- struction, and the Michigan Sports Television Production Studio will be relocated to Mich- igan Stadium until the project is completed in 2013 or 2014. DO YO LIETO WRITE? WILL YOU BE IN ANN ARBOR THIS SUMMER? WRITE FOR THE MICHIGAN DAILY E-mail bethlb@michigandaily.com Ghadafi aides tempted with BRUSSELS NATO airstrikes finanCIa offers have strong impact The international aerial onslaught against Moammar Gadhafi's forces has destroyed 30 percent of Libya's military capac- ity, a senior NATO official said yesterday. NATO warplanes have flown 851 sorties in the six days since the alliance took command of all operations from a U.S.-led international force that had been bombing Libya since March 19. Dutch Brig. Gen. Mark Van Uhm said Canadian Lt. Gen. Charles Bouchard, who com- mands the Libyan operation from his headquarters in Naples, briefed NATO's governing body yesterday. "(Bouchard's) assessment is that we have taken out 30 percent of the military capacity of the pro-Gadhafi forces," Van Uhm said. -Compiled from Daily wire reports rv Critics worry incentives will set bad precedent for future LONDON (AP) - It's an offer that diplomats hope Moam- mar Gadhafi's family and top aides can't refuse: If they pub- licly withdraw support for the Libyan dictator's regime, the restrictions on their assets and travel plans could be made to vanish. The U.S. Treasury and Brit- ain's Foreign Office have spelled out the details of the proposal, and discussions are now under way at the European Union ahead of a meeting of foreign ministers next week. Talks on the proposed deal will also take place among U.N. Security Council members if any of those named under U.N. sanctions flee from Libya and renounce Gadhafi. Gadhafi's seven sons, a wife, his daughter, two cousins and other allies who have served him for much of his rule are all being given a chance to escape international blacklists and reclaim billions of dollars of seized funds. But some critics recoil atthe thought, wondering whether the incentives will set a bad precedent for giving billions back to possible plunderers or even if the measures will work to oust Gadhafi. The offer came as Gadhafi's forces unleashed a withering bombardment on the rebels outside a key oil town yes- terdayy and a U.S. envoy met with the rebels in the eastern city of Benghazi in a possible step toward diplomatic recog- A nition.